A long list of lessons

The Tibet Museum is often empty, or at the very least, mostly empty. Empty enough that the haunting soundtrack of the looped video in the first floor’s exhibits echoes through the whole museum—all roughly 4,000 square feet of its white-washed and stone-floored space. In just that few thousand square feet, the museum’s curators have attempted to say everything you can about Tibet’s history: Tibet before Chinese rule, the Chinese invasion, the Tibetan resistance, political prisoners’ experience, destruction of human rights in Tibet, “Sinicization”—the process of making Tibetans less Tibetan and more Chinese, how Tibetans escape now, and what the hopes are for the future. They’ve pulled together little pieces of evidence to indicate that Tibet was an autonomous country when the Chinese army marched onto the roof of the world in 1949. They had coin and paper currency, stamps, passports that had been marked with visas for countries all over the world. In a 1934 cover story, “Flags of the World,” Tibet’s flag featured on the cover. See, they say. We were a real country before we were just a part of China.

One of the few exhibits where artifacts extend beyond photos or video is that on the prisoners’ experience, which includes a blood-spattered shirt worn by a prisoner, a scarf worn to gray, handcuffs, an electric shock device, smoke bombs, knives, and hand-woven necklaces, scarves and bracelets, all done in a design to bring good luck.

People wander through, read over the posted information, look at photos of men, women and children walking through the snow to cross the Himalayas from Tibet to India, dolls in traditional dress, a few coins tarnished to illegible dark circles. The afternoon showing of “Undercover in Tibet,” a documentary that tries to answer why Tibetans risk everything to escape to India, draws a bit of a crowd, and then people filter out again.

It’s not that they’re not interested. It’s that they’re busy.

Dharamsala is a volunteer’s town. Posters and flyers and newsletters and pamphlets and people on the street take volunteers who come to stay for a week or a month or a few months. The Rogpa Café, which always smells of tantalizing pastries and freshly baked, homemade muesli, is staffed entirely by volunteers. An Australian and a Korean woman struggle through translations to sort out who plans to do the dishes, then sit for dinner together at the end of the bar.

Every week day, the Tibet Hope Center opens its doors, or rather, its courtyard, for English language speakers to volunteer an hour and a half to talk to English language learners in informal conversation classes. Monday, I walked into the Hope Center, gave its director and founder (and the man who generally runs the show from morning to night), Kunsang Tenzin, my name and said yes, I’d volunteer at the drop-in English classes. Fifteen minutes later, I was sitting with Choku, a Tibetan monk, and Shinee, a Mongolian accountant, holding the day’s prompt for discussions: freedom. We talk about its various expressions—Choku left Tibet so he could study Buddhism, so what he talked about is freedom of education and freedom of religion. Shinee says she sees freedom in everyday choices, your clothes, your job, your food, your whole lifestyle.

I’ve gone back to talk with Tibetans, and repeatedly with Shinee, about love, sources of happiness, and ways of nonviolence.

Shinee, who is learning English so she can move up from her job as an accountant to work in international finance in Mongolia, astounds me daily. Six months ago, she says, she could barely understand English and what she could speak in English left her partners in conversation saying only, “What? What? Repeat, please?”

Now, she can talk for most of the hour, barely faltering. The once she didn’t manage to nail her pronunciation of “lawyer” and we had to talk it through to figure out what she was trying to say, she covered her mouth in this apologetic embarrassment, as if after six months she should have the Oxford English Dictionary memorized. Actually, I’d give her another 12 months and she could have the dictionary down—but maybe Webster’s Collegiate, not the OED. She studies from breakfast until bed, which comes at 1am or 2am, memorizing 10 or 20 new words every day.

She’s given up Mongolian music and movies for music and movies in English, and searches lyrics for American songs on the Internet, and then transcribes them into a notebook. In four or five days, she’ll have a new song memorized and will be singing along with Jennifer Lopez, Avril Lavigne, James Blunt, Timbaland, or Kelly Clarkson. She flipped through the notebook with me, reading off the song titles and looking to me to see if I know them. If I don’t immediately nod, and sometimes even if I do, she sings a few bars. We sang together, “Last Christmas, I gave you my heart, but the very next day, you tore it apart. This year, to save me from tears, I’ll give it to someone special.” (Thank you, pop radio, for enabling me to have this experience.)

I’ve talked to a Tibetan artist whose family sent him, their only son, out of Tibet so he could study religious painting in India; to a woman who left Tibet when she was eight months pregnant. She was lucky enough to get a flight out with her husband; her sister, who is also here, walked for a month to get out of Tibet. I’ve talked to a man with stories from days in the Chinese army, and a man who says he’s not smart, can’t study Buddhism, but has the intricacies of passport and visa regulations between China, Nepal and Tibet memorized.

They all say they want to learn English because it will bring them more opportunities—for work, for studying, for travel.

It’s a quiet thing, an unobtrusive way of spending some time, hoping that you’re helping people out. Hoping that this little bit more of practice brings them a little closer to those opportunities they’re reaching for.

Volunteering for Contact, a Tibetan newsletter, was every bit as easy, though finding the editor was not. I looked for him in his office, only to be told he was at the café he manages. I went to the café, a charming nook of a place with an enthralling collection of books, only to be told he had run to the market. Not a problem in a place with bookshelves stocked like that. I was deep in a memoir of a daughter of Chinese immigrants when Lobsang returned. I said I was willing to volunteer some time copy editing the newsletter, and without so much as asking my experience or training, he set up a time to meet at his offices to work on the next edition.

I found him at his desk in an office frequented by a small flock of swallows. They sailed up and down the hallway outside his open door, then one or two would swoop in and perch on a pipe or the top of the door. He seemed entirely accustomed to them, able to ignore them completely, though they chirped so loudly I could barely hear him talking. I took a seat, and turned my attention to editing stories on the gatherings that recognized the anniversary of Uprising Day, when Tibetans fought back, and a monk who self-immolated in March.

It’s all part of the strange education this trip has been.

Tuesday evening, Learning and Ideas for Tibet, which is squeezed into a tiny, barely-marked basement room, hosted a former political prisoner. People squeezed in, sitting cross-legged on the floor, the knees of one person against the back of the next, to a room that quickly became too hot with body heat. A window was cracked, and the door left open, so when the translator, Dhundup, stood to relay the former prisoner’s story, he was silhouetted against the night sky, which occasionally flashed purple with broad streaks of lightning. Soepa, the former prisoner, talked of his home in Chamdo, a land of fruit and flowers he called one of the most beautiful places in Tibet. He was a monk there, studying Buddhism.

Soepa was imprisoned for five years for recognizing the Panchen Lama, who is meant to provide spiritual guidance for Tibet in tandem with the Dalai Lama. (The Panchen Lama has been missing since 1996 and Tibetans call him the world’s youngest political prisoner—he was about seven years old when he disappeared.)

He was carried from his home in eastern Tibet across all five prisons in Tibet to Drapchi Prison. What he withstood in prison, he said, you could not imagine. But he has never been the same, physically or psychologically, since then.

“Before I protested the Chinese government, I made up my mind, whether I’m going to be imprisoned or not, I’m going to protest the Chinese government because we need our freedom,” he said. “Whether my body is going to be kept by China, they cannot keep my mind.”

That decision and the mental training he received as a Buddhist, he said, were what kept him from succumbing to the attempts at “reforming” his mind while he was in prison.

After he was released, he said, he went home to Chamdo. But his mind had started to move, and it moved toward India. In 2002, he left Tibet illegally. He’s spent years recovering, he said, and now works with the Tibetan Political Prisoner’s Association.

Dhundup, the translator, thanked people for coming and listening, then he charged them with a task.

“You have to say to your friends, to your government, there is no peace in Tibet,” he said. “There is not enough food in Tibet. You have to say this to your friends and colleagues.”

And so I’m saying it to you.